The punch-card voting method is alive and well in Ohio after a bitterly divided elections-study panel yesterday could not agree on sweeping reforms.

Its members also couldn't agree on which faction was presenting the most Alice-In-Wonderland-like argument, or which member sat on the most national elections panels.

In the end, the 6-5 vote to approve a watered- down, month-late report was a result of power politics. Even though the Election System Study Committee was set up merely to advise state lawmakers after Florida's vote-tabulating debacle in last year's presidential race, legislative leaders heavily lobbied members to achieve the desired result.

But unlike traditional Statehouse battles, this one primarily pitted Republican vs. Republican.

The big loser was GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who pushed hard for a voting system that would allow voters a second chance to cast a ballot if they made a mistake, count votes at the precinct level and provide an audit trail for elections workers.

Now, he said, Ohio will fall behind other states, many of which have already upgraded their voting methods.

"I think the punch-card system should go tomorrow,'' Blackwell said.

As Ohio's chief elections officer, Blackwell must approve all elections systems, and he promised to explore whether he has the legal authority to ban punch-card devices from the state. The method now is used in 69 of Ohio's 88 counties.

He has said that replacing punch-card machines with optical readers would cost $47.6 million.

The weakened report says Ohioans should be more educated when they go to the polls, but it hardly addressed the issue of punch-card ballots -- essentially blaming voters rather than machines for ballots that go uncounted, Blackwell said.

The big winner -- and Blackwell's main protagonist -- was Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Republican from suburban Dayton whose rival proposal was authored by Senate staff members.

He said the panel's report as amended by his proposal contains "significant, specific reforms,'' including a proposed pilot program of alternative voting methods in four counties.

Jacobson, Montgomery County GOP chairman, questioned studies indicating problems with the punch-card voting system. For example, he said the results of a Dispatch computer-assisted report after last year's election -- which showed that poor, Appalachian counties had the highest presidential undervote -- easily could be explained by pro-gun Democrats bypassing the race for the White House because they didn't like Al Gore.

Jacobson also said that if the panel recommended dumping punch-card voting but the legislature didn't agree, counties would be set up for lawsuits by disgruntled voters who could use the committee's report as evidence.

Keith A. Cunningham, director of the Allen County Board of Elections, challenged Jacobson to "find another county agency using technology as old as county boards of elections.''

Blackwell and Jacobson clashed over which one was offering the most specious, Alice-In-Wonderland argument; at one point the secretary of state offered to give the senator a copy of Through the Looking Glass autographed by Lewis Carroll.

Then Blackwell and Hamilton County Commissioner John Dowlin went back and forth over who had served on more national elections panels.